Journal of the History of Ideas

Pliny's Natural History is often referred to as one of the first western encyclopedias and its encyclopedism is central to how it is used and understood. This article argues for a reassessment of the grounds on which we call the Natural History an encyclopedia by reexamining its relationship to the works of Cato, Varro, and Celsus and to the ancient educational concept of enkuklios paideia. If Pliny's Natural History is an encyclopedia, it is not because it belonged to an ancient genre of encyclopedias that ancient readers and writers recognized as such; its encyclopedism needs to be understood instead as a product of the text's reception history.